Parasocial Perfidy
by spiderstan0spiderstan
Summary: In which Peter feels betrayed, and does some spring cleaning.


Propaganda.

Maybe Peter was overreacting, but it made an uncomfortable sort of sense. People tended to trust you, when they pledged allegiance to your outfit every day. There was a sort of mass-projection going on. Everyone looked at the flag, and associated the man wearing it with freedom, hope, opportunity- whatever they liked about the country. Confirmation bias did the rest.

Peter was crouched in the cramped, dusty crawl-space above his room, digging through miscellaneous junk.

Captain America was, in simple English, an asshole.

Peter found what he was looking for; a Captain America action figure, one of the line that'd came out after the chitauri invasion. He'd been almost twelve when they hit the shelves, but demanded one anyway. He'd managed to break the trigger mechanism for the shield in less than a week, leaving a chunk of red plastic wedged in the toy's gauntlet for the past three years.

 _The safest hands are still our own_ , he'd said. Tony had it taped; security footage.

Like he could make that judgement. Like Captain America the person was Captain America the icon; like he was smarter and less biased than entire panel of people. Like being superhuman made him perfect.

Tony Stark was a flawed person, who sometimes did bad things, but at least he could admit that to himself.

Peter tossed the toy through the trapdoor, with a little more force than necessary. He heard it bounce off his bed and graze the ceiling.

It was hard to believe Captain America could be so _selfish,_ so completely biased. And he was definitely biased. Mostly towards the Winter Soldier.

A pair of shield-patterned earmuffs was poking from an overstuffed cardboard box. Peter didn't remember putting them up there but he was glad he had- they'd been incredibly embarrassing after the first day, even in sixth grade. _Especially_ in sixth grade. One of the white stars was still tinted taupe from the slushballs.

He understood the idea of protecting your friends, but nobody had friends _that_ close. Even if Captain America did, it was still stupid of him to metaphorically stick his fingers in his ears and go 'la la la, I can't hear your potentially lifesaving and totally amenable political proposals' over a _career killer_ and expect no blowback. Nobody could un-murder people, even if it was possible to bring James Barnes back.

Peter had been to the smithsonian; the smiling soldier in the exhibit was worlds away from the man he'd fought at Leipzig/Halle.

Captain America was obsessed with a person who no longer existed.

It would have been tragic if he wasn't being such a dick about it.

The shoebox of vintage comics- all still in their plastic sleeves, untouchable by _grubby kid hands_ \- made it safely to the floor. They'd belonged to aunt May's mom. Apparently, Captain America fanaticism skipped a generation.

That was the thing about Captain America; he'd been created in the forties. They'd probably told him he was everything good about the country, and he might just have believed them. Maybe he'd been perfect for the forties, Peter didn't know.

There was a translucent bag of old clothes, perpetually hovering between donation and being forgotten. Half of Peter's wardrobe had been Captain America stuff a couple years ago, because he'd been such an insufferable dork that he'd thought wearing an actual, literal target to school every day would be a good idea.

This was 2016, and Captain America didn't really seem to have a grip on the times. He was acting like he was above international law, and he seemed to think that letting people as powerful as the Avengers run around without so much as _guidelines_ was a good idea.

Peter didn't really have guidelines, but he was just one guy, not the most powerful team of people in the world. And he wasn't on the international stage, either. You couldn't dress up in stars and stripes and run around doing just _whatever_ on foreign soil. Not anymore.

There were drawings, which had gotten pretty good for a middle schooler. It'd been a defense mechanism; not many people wanted to hit the weird art kid. Or, if they did, they didn't act on it.

God, it was like being five years old and finding out Santa wasn't real. Captain America was a big, flashy lie that he shouldn't have fallen for.

It was embarrassing, that he'd been so convinced.

He ducked through the trapdoor and onto the flaking ceiling, crawled out of the range of heap of Cap-themed junk, and dropped to the floor. There was dust clinging to his red sweater. He still had to dig through his current clothes. He'd gotten a few shirts and stuff at the start of the school year, because people were theoretically nicer as they got older. Ninth grade had crushed his hopes for that.

Captain America hadn't known he existed until Leipzig/Halle, but Peter'd loved him for years. How could he not? Steve Rogers _embodied_ the idea of 'it gets better'. He'd worked hard and been resilient and a billion other buzzwords, and he'd done the impossible.

Or, that was what people said. Really, he'd gotten lucky. He'd been in the right place at the right time with the 'right' personality. It didn't seem fair, now that he'd shown his true colours.

It took Peter about half an hour to pack everything up, folding old clothes and throwing out broken toys. A small, petty part of him was angry enough to want to burn everything, but that'd be wasteful and dangerous and set off the smoke alarms and freak out the upstairs neighbors' baby.

Some goodwill-shopping kid would be very, very happy. Kids loved Captain America; he required a certain amount of childish, unquestioning trust to enjoy.

Really, it was high time Peter outgrew him.


End file.
